Terence Corcoran: Strike plan tests Occupy mettle

Occupy May Day: Strike plan tests Occupy mettle

A May Day of mass action or empty talk?

May 1, 2012. International Workers’ Day, a celebration of global leftism originally established to mark the 1886 police-activist clash in Chicago’s Haymarket Square but today serving as a test of whether the original Occupy Wall Street movement has any legs.

The talk is big, global. The plan improbable. The language over-the-top. They want a General Strike. “We call on people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take a day off of work,” said one Occupy statement. “No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping,” said another. While that sounds like the type of slogan a spoiled generation of teenagers would endorse, major mass public action is planned from Toronto and Montreal to New York, London, Kuala Lumpur and hundreds of cities around the world.

The demos and boycotts and inevitable clashes with authority are seen by the left as a mere “spring offensive” that will lead to a summer of escalating confrontation.

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Revolution is in the air, or at least the word “revolution” is in the air, spread by such veteran leftist luminaries as Noam Chomsky, who said “Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.”

A long-time critic of the major media as an oppressive facet of global corporate and political control, Prof. Chomsky is no slouch himself when it comes to cashing in on news flow. He has just produced a new booklet titled Occupy, published by Zuccotti Park Press (available as of May 1 at amazon.ca for $9.89). Through 125 large-type pages, Prof. Chomsky rehashes his long-standing critiques of capitalism and massages them into the slogans of the Occupy movement. He delights in the imagery of the 99% versus the 1% and reports that “the U.S. is off the spectrum on this. The inequalities have risen to historically unprecedented heights.”

‘Revolution is in the air, or at least the word “revolution” is in the air, spread by such veteran leftist luminaries as Noam Chomsky’

Prof. Chomsky turns out to be a perfect prism through which to view the mass demonstrations and claims to revolutionary force taking place this May Day. He has seen it all before, and it is mostly as it was before.

His most famous work is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, a 1988 attack on the role of the corporate media that “serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.”

Somebody once made a movie about Prof. Chomsky titled Manufacturing Dissent. The Occupy movement fits right in with the Chomsky world view, which is no surprise. In a 2002 update of his book, Prof. Chomsky complained that in the early 1990s, during anti-globalization demonstrations, mainstream media stereotyped activists as “ignorant troublemakers.” The media of the day, he says, “repeatedly reported on activists attire, looks, body odors, fadism and lacking anything that can coherently be called a cause.”

It’s still valid today. Most of the mainstream media stand back from the Occupy activist communities that are constantly at the door of banks, corporations and politicians. What Prof. Chomsky and Occupy are up against may well be a general attitude toward Occupy that is seen as a largely unrepresentative political and ideological force that still has no coherent plan. They remain, in many eyes, ignorant troublemakers.

Here’s an example from the mainstream comedy media. A couple of weeks ago, The Comedy Network’s Stephen Colbert talked to another leftish academic, Harvard’s Michael Sandel, about income inequality in the United States. Prof. Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, asked Mr. Colbert if it were fair that Yankees baseball star Alex Rodrigues makes $25-million per year while the average schoolteacher makes $45,000. Mr. Colbert responded: “What is the teacher’s batting average?”

Very few media have been following the developing general strike story so far. That will change as the demonstrations take hold through May Day, and depending on how successful the Occupy activists are in mobilizing their troops.

There are troops available, to be sure. In Quebec, students protesting higher tuition fees have been “on strike” for months. Most of the media treated the student actions as a genuine protest against rising tuition fees.

It never was as is now more than clear. Quebec pollster Jean-Marc Leger, in a column in Le Journal de Montreal, wrote last week that “What is happening (on campuses) in Quebec is more important than what you think.” The students are part of the international Occupy movement that for the first time in 40 years is protesting against a “sclerotic society.”

This is Noam Chomsky territory. In an interview recently, Prof. Chomsky said “It’s a class war, and a war on young people too … that’s why tuition is rising so rapidly. There’s no real economic reason for that. It’s a technique of control and indoctrination.” Occupy is the first organized revolt against such control in 30 years, he said as incoherent as ever.

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